Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade:
The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600-1400

Tansen Sen

There were military and strategic motivations for early links between
China and South Asia, with a geopolitical balance involving Tibet
and the Arabs. But it was Buddhism that underpinned links during the
7th through 9th centuries, through the movement of or trade in monks,
relics, manuscripts, and longevity physicians. This is where Tansen
Sen's Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade starts.

Dependent on Indian relics and teachings, Chinese clergy faced a
"borderland" complex, but China developed as a Buddhist centre in its
own right by the 8th century. Some key developments included relic
worship at the Famen monastery and its role in Tang dynastic politics,
Mount Wutai as the abode of the bodhisattva Manjusri, and, drawing
on ideas of Buddhist decline in India and regeneration in China, the
cult of Maitreya. The latter culminated in Wu Zetian's adoption of the
title; her reign was "arguably the most vibrant era in the history of
Sino-Indian interactions, and ... perhaps marked the highest point in
Indic influences on Chinese society".

Buddhist links between India and China persisted after the 9th century:
monks and relics moved in both directions and during the Song dynasty
there was an official translation project, though it was plagued by a
shortage of translators and reused older work. But,

"by the end of the tenth century, Buddhism in India and China had
taken two very different paths. While Indian Buddhism developed
its own philosophical and ritualistic (esoteric) traditions,
the Chinese clergy formulated and propagated their own indigenous
teachings. This divergence ... ended the millennium-long epoch of
a vigorous Sino-Indian intercourse stimulated by the transmission
of Buddhist doctrines and pilgrimage activity."

This was one factor in the reconfiguration of Sino-Indian trade.
Others were a possible decline in urbanism in North India, the movement
of sugar-making technology to China, the spread of Islam, and the more
mercantile outlook of late Tang and Song China and of South Indian
kingdoms such as the Cholas.

"Prior to the tenth century, Sino-India trade was founded on
and supported by the network of mercantile groups that either
adhered or were sympathetic to the Buddhist teachings. ...

By the mid-eleventh century, traders from Muslim diasporas
dominated almost every circuit of Indian Ocean commerce
from the Chinese coast to India and beyond."

In a wider context, long-term changes in Sino-Indian trade can be
connected to the global networks studied by world systems theorists,
the stability of Central Asia, Chola raids on Southeast Asia, Chinese
foreign policy under the Ming, and the spread of trading diasporas in
both directions.

This summary does little justice to the wealth of detail Tansen Sen
provides in Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade. It is not a narrow
monograph, however: the more technical material is left to eighty pages
of endnotes and the approach is broad. This is a work which will make
details of Buddhist doctrine interesting to economic historians and
trade links interesting to students of religion.